July 29, 2020 - 3:00pm
“All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Whether Leo Tolstoy was correct in that observation of home life, it is perhaps true of political ideologies, depending on your world view. According to a new paper (h/t @DegenRolf) liberals are more similar to each other than conservatives are, even if “conservatives perceive greater ingroup similarity than do liberals”.
This is not the first paper to notice this pattern. In my book Small Men on the Wrong Side of History (I might have mentioned it once or twice), I cited a 2017 study of 80,000 people across 400 political issues which found that people on the Left are more alike than conservatives are, agreeing more across a swathe of political arguments.
My interpretation of this is that progressivism is more like a religion, or more accurately is about religio, the Latin word for a belief that bonds people together as a community. It is more credal because communities of belief need to have doctrinal creeds to keep the group together; this explains why people on the Left are more likely to fall out over issues of ideological purity, as it is with religious communities.
It also explains why the Left is less diverse than the Right, which is by definition an alliance of everyone who’s not on the orthodox Left, and who have been cast out for one reason or another — including such incongruous groups as libertarians, neoconservatives, Christian socialists and “the intellectual dark web”, most of whom are liberals rather than conservatives.
People on the Right tend to be more idiosyncratic in their beliefs, although that same 2017 survey found that within smaller conservative sub-groups, they were more in agreement with each other than Left-wing sub-groups.
As an example, many Christians are very active in Left-wing causes, especially on the issues of poverty, immigration and war; you occasionally still get nuns trying to break into nuclear bases, for instance. They are unquestionably not “Right-wing”, yet at the same time, their views on things such as sex education and abortion evoke more hostility from their own side than any of their beliefs do from the Right.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeLiberals are more alike than conservatives because they are incapable of independent thought. It is as simple as that.
Of course illiberals and regressives are more alike. As a group they believe they know best, and as such are very keen to tell other people what to do. In fact, not to just tell, but to insist on it and refuse to listen to any other view point – hence more alike and their fondness for cancelling people.
As Fraser wrote they are incapable of independent thought.
Listening to my leftist ex-gf and her uni-lecturer friends was like being a guest at a party of parrots.
ex-gf, eh? I can see something on your shoulder…
it’s irrelevant. both are competitive and coercive, irrespective of sub-group.
The left are cultural vandals. They always exhibit the same traits.
VOTE for Independents and I like Some Social Democrat Policies ie Exit EU for Good & Pump money into manufacturing